Most people are familiar with the concept of a “carbon footprint,” and some even feel dutifully guilty about their own. “Water footprints” get a little less play. Even though we live on a blue planet (oddly named “Earth” by one of its continentally-biased inhabitants), water is still a precious resource that warrants conservation. After all, over 99 percent of that water is either in salty oceans or frozen glaciers.
A paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences delves into an analysis of humanity’s water footprint and the various components that contribute to it. This isn’t the first stab at a global assessment, but it’s a significant improvement on earlier work. And, in one of the more interesting twists, it accounts for the international movement of water use that occurs when a good that requires water is shipped to another country.
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from Ars Technica